Amnesty in the Age of Human Rights Accountability: Comparative and International Perspectives

This edited volume brings together well-established and emerging scholars of transitional justice to discuss the persistence of amnesty in the age of human rights accountability. The volume attempts to reframe debates, moving beyond the limited approaches of “truth versus justice” or “stability versus accountability” in which many of these issues have been cast in the existing scholarship. The theoretical and empirical contributions in this edited book offer new ways of understanding and tackling the enduring persistence of amnesty in the age of accountability. Authors use social movement, ideational, legal, path dependent, qualitative case study, statistical, and cross-national approaches in their chapters. In addition to cross-national studies, the volume encompasses eleven country cases of amnesty for past human rights violations, some well-known and others with little scholarly or advocacy exposure: Argentina, Brazil, Cambodia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Rwanda, South Africa, Spain, Uganda, and Uruguay. The volume goes beyond merely describing these case studies, but also considers what we learn from them in terms of overcoming impunity and promoting accountability to contribute to improvements in human rights and democracy.

Francesca Lessa is Postdoctoral Research Assistant at the Latin American Centre and Research Fellow at St Anne's College, University of Oxford, where she works on 'The Impact of Transitional Justice on Human Rights and Democracy', a project funded by the US National Science Foundation and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Before joining the University of Oxford, she was Research Associate for the Latin America International Affairs Programme, IDEAS Centre, at the London School of Economics, and visiting Lecturer on Transitional Justice and Human Rights at the Faculty of Psychology, University of the Republic, Montevideo, Uruguay. Lessa is co-editor (with Vincent Druliolle) of The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay (2011) and (with Gabriela Fried) of Luchas contra la impunidad: Uruguay, 1985–2011 (2011).

Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Sociology and Latin America at the University of Oxford and Governing Body Fellow of St Antony's College. She is currently a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota. She is the recipient of numerous research awards including one, most recently, from the US National Science Foundation and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council for a collaborative research project entitled 'The Impact of Transitional Justice on Human Rights and Democracy'. She co-edited (with Ksenija Bilbija) Accounting for Memory: Marketing Memory in Latin America (2011) and co-authored (with Tricia D. Olsen and Andrew Reiter) Transitional Justice in Balance: Comparing Processes, Weighing Efficacy (2010). Her most recent solo authored book is Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (2008).